The Huntsville, Ala., district expelled 14 students last year based on the findings of a private contractor who monitored students’ social-media activity as part of greater school security efforts, according to a review by The Huntsville Times. Twelve of them were black, drawing concerns that the program unfairly targeted African-American students.
Overall, the district expelled 305 students last year, 238 of them black. Seventy-eight percent of all expulsions involved black children, in a system where 40 percent of students are black, the newspaper found. Expulsions related to social-media investigations were a small part of that total.
Superintendent Casey Wardynski said that security personnel had investigated the social-media accounts of 600 of the district’s 24,000 students since January.
